The Never-Ending Circle
by Tiger Khan
Summary: The Lion King is dead, but is his death really that terrible of an event, or just another point on the never-ending circle? This oneshot is a brief, family-friendly piece that expands on some of the themes in the original movie, so read it to see my take on what happens when Simba dies of old age, decades after the movies.


Disclaimer: I do not own The Lion King or any of the ideas in it. They are the property of the Walt Disney Company

Copyright: No one is allowed to take credit for this work or the ideas in it apart from me. If you want to use it somehow, I would appreciate it if you were to get in touch with me first.

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The Lion King: The Never-Ending Circle

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(I have been called out of retirement from The Lion King fandom due to a combination of events that have taken place in the past few weeks, and the wishes of my little cousin. There's not much to say, other than that this piece will be short, sweet, and family-friendly, so there's no extreme or inappropriate content of any kind here. Please read on.)

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The passage of the years had changed the landscape, yet the nature of their homeland hadn't changed. It was still rugged, foreboding, difficult and potentially dangerous; yet it was also compassionate, welcoming, and eager to provide life to those who had what it took to take life from it.

In this manner, the endless plains of the Pride Lands had sustained life for a generation without pause.

And what life it sustained.

These days, the collective of lions that made their home there thrived. There weren't just a handful of them anymore, a royal family and a few others; these days, there was the royal family, its extended family members, and a dozen others who had come, over the years, and decided to stay. Now, there were more mouths to feed than ever before, and more lives to defend than ever before, but the continued growth and prosperity of the pride was a testament to its home's life-giving prowess.

But there was another side to that powerful force, the one that nurtured life and saw it grow. Life fed on death, and that was a lesson taught every time the pride made a kill in the hunt or was forced to go to the extreme to defend themselves or their homeland. The other side of life was death, and that was a fact, and a fate, that no one could escape.

And that day, when the Sun set over the seemingly endless plains of the Pride Lands, fate caught up with Simba.

He had lain to rest and never woken up, as far as anyone could tell, and that was no surprise. He was old, older than perhaps any other lion who had fought battles and wars like he had could have ever hoped to be. He was old, and scarred, and to his enemies, he could be a hard, merciless man.

But to his family and his beloved pride, he was a loving, gentle, father-like figure.

That's what they had come to call him, over time, as he had seen not only grandchildren but great-grandchildren enter the world. They had called him "Father", because that's what he was to them. He taught them what to do, he told them what to do, and when they failed to follow his orders, sometimes, he punished them. But any punishments he enacted upon his pride he did so with regret and remorse, and only when all other options were exhausted.

And he was a friendly man, right up until the very end. Blood didn't matter to him, he was always ready to carry one of the young ones around on his broad, powerful shoulders, no matter who they were. He was always ready to give advice to anyone who asked, and he was always there whenever others went through difficult times.

And now he was dead.

In accordance with the traditions of the land, he was carried out of Pride Rock and taken into the distances. The procession that followed him contained not only his family and his relatives, but his pride. The few who had been selected to act as sentries while the funeral took place universally decided that they'd rather be negligent in their duties than to miss the ceremony that marked the passage of their Father into the next world, and the result was that _every last member_ of Simba's pride took part in the march into the distant reaches of the Pride Lands, where those who died were set to rest forever.

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Tears streaked dark, wet paths through the fur on her face, but she didn't say a word. She was lost for words, such was her grief, and her mother's grief was beyond even that. Simba had been Nala's first, last, and only love, and the two had known each other essentially from birth. But she still stood tall and strong and proud as she walked, and perhaps that was what let Kiara do the same.

Perhaps it was Kovu's presence that let her stand tall. Perhaps she found herself staying strong for his sake, because she could tell how deep his grief was. Simba had been the closest thing to a father he'd ever known, and, until he was well into adulthood, the only positive male influence in Kovu's life.

Perhaps it was the presence of her children and grandchildren that let her walk straight. Perhaps she knew that if even she couldn't maintain her pride at such a moment, they couldn't possibly be expected to do the same, and would all collapse under the weight of their grief… and the weight of his body.

He had always been a big lion; in many ways, he'd been larger than life. Ever Kovu, who had grown to be one of the very most powerfully-built lions anyone had ever seen, could barely subdue Simba in a sparring match, and that had been when Kovu was old and Simba was older. Now, though, Simba was a big, dead, hulking mass, whose limbs would never again arise, whose face would never again light up with a smile, whose body would never again perch itself on the very tip of Pride Rock and survey, with a calm sense of satisfaction, the prosperity and beauty that it had created.

It was madness, in a sense. In a sense, all death was madness, but Simba's death was madness upon madness. The idea of referring to him in the past tense was inconceivable, and the idea of dealing with things—planning hunts, responding to attacks, dealing with internal issues—that was unbearable.

And yet, as Simba had gotten older, he had groomed the next generations to take over from him and Nala, Kovu and Kiara especially. Towards the end, his daughter and son and law had taken on increasing proportions of his responsibilities until, really, he hadn't had to do much at all except for make sure that everyone was alright and play with his grandchildren and great-grandchildren and their friends from the time the Sun rose from one horizon to the time it set beyond the other.

He must have sensed that his death was coming.

And yet he hadn't said a word about it to anyone—not to her, not to Kovu, not to Nala, not to any one of the younger lieutenants he'd put in charge of the various duties that had to be done around the Pride Lands. Perhaps he'd said something about the approach of his fate to Sharif, the one who had taken over from Rafiki on a rainy day years and years before many of the pride's members had even been born.

But Sharif hadn't said a word to anyone, and when Kiara realized that, she had to hold herself back from running forward, taking the shaman to the ground, and threatening him with her teeth until he explained why he had known to enter Pride Rock in the middle of the night and then somberly announce the death of the King.

Even if Simba had told Sharif that the unavoidable was coming for him, then… Sharif had done well by not telling anyone else about it. If Simba had wanted others to know about what was to come, he would have told them himself, but he hadn't. And his behavior hadn't changed in the past few weeks, Kiara realized—he hadn't become fearful, or morose, or distant, or cold. If anything, he had become… warmer, more pleasant, almost as if he was excited, or preparing to go on another adventure.

When Kiara realized that, she felt like screaming. She felt like grabbing hold of her father's body and asking him if this was his idea of an adventure, if death, the most final and awful thing that could happen to a person, was his idea of a new, exciting journey to be prepared for.

Death was to be avoided, Kiara thought. It was to be condemned and cursed and beaten down every time it rose its head, and if it really was coming for the last time, it was to be avoided at all costs.

But Simba hadn't avoided his death. He hadn't asked for any medicines from Sharif, he hadn't taken rest, and he hadn't asked for reprieves from the responsibilities that were still his on his final day. He hadn't… done anything, really, except for going to sleep that past night with strange words for Kiara, Kovu, Nala, and a few of his grandchildren.

"I'll see you tomorrow," he said. "I'll see you when the next Sun rises."

Not "when the Sun rises next". "When the next Sun rises."

When Kiara had heard that, she'd assumed that she'd misheard her father, though her ears were as powerful and sensitive as they'd ever been. That phrase… it hadn't sent a chill up her spine, nor had it informed her in any other way of its true nature.

Now, she knew what her father had been talking about. And now… she still wasn't sure what he meant. After all, death wasn't a sunrise, it was a sun_set_. Death was an end, not a beginning, and not even Simba, the mightiest of all the Lion Kings, could deny that.

Maybe, as the end had grown closer, he'd just gone insane.

* * *

The procession was at an end: it had reached its destination.

In the far northeast of the Pride Lands, there was a lonesome group of trees in the center of a region where low, rolling plains transformed into uninhabitable desert. In the crux of these trees, the only ones of their kind _anywhere_, there was a large vat of sand, upon which were ashes and dust: the only sign of what the place was used for.

Simba was placed into this black, dusty mass, and left there. Then, his closest family members and friends began to search around the small forest for fallen branches and chunks of wood. These they collected and piled up around and on top of Simba.

The whole while, Sharif was murmuring a series of incantations and placing the powdered mixture of several select plants collected through the region onto Simba's body. In time, there was enough wood, and in time, Sharif's incantations finished, and when they did, a lone flame appeared in the center of the pyre.

In seconds, it spread, engulfing Simba's body and the wood that surrounded it in flames. The fire was hot, and _bright_, so bright that as much as the lions closest to Simba wanted to look at him until the end, they were forced to avert their eyes or risk blindness.

And by the time they could look again, Simba's body was gone. It had been consumed by the flames, and, as the wind began to kick up, the dust and ashes that remained would soon be scattered throughout the land.

Kiara was crying again. So was Nala, and Kovu, and their children and grandchildren. Simba's friends and lieutenants were crying, and so were the lions who had joined his pride over the years, because it somehow seemed so horribly, terribly unjust for the few isolated remains of the Lion King to be taken by the winds and diluted and dragged into nothingness…

Sharif wasn't crying, though. He wasn't sad, or angry, or anything else. Instead, the expression on his face… was beyond explanation, and beyond description. If anything, it could be called serene, or perhaps understanding, even as he opened his mouth to say fours words.

"Look at the stars."

And so they did. Every lion present looked skyward, and for a moment, all they could see were the stars.

And then they looked harder, and deeper. They didn't just look _at_ the stars, they looked into them, and at the same time, they began to look around.

The trees in that, the most remote sector of the Pride Lands, were solemn and silent among the sands and the plains. To the south, though, there were better lands, and there were more forests. There were also jungles, valleys, powerful rivers that cut through the landscape, and a thousand thousand other features in the land that were unique, and beautiful, and _alive_.

The stars themselves were alive, they began to realize—how could they not be, when they danced and shimmered like that? Everything was alive, they began to realize; not just the stars and not just the Earth, but the trees, and the plains, and the grass, and the rocks, and the soil that made up their home.

In time, there was a great, all-encompassing light from the east as the Sun began to rise. Its ascent was slow, however, so that a brief period of twilight preceded dawn. In this time, an ethereal, purple-blue light was cast into the cosmos, and in this light, they saw something in the sky beyond, greater, and above the stars.

Eternity was visible in the sky. Somehow, the Pride Landers could see into eternity, and when they did, they saw Simba, and all the came before him, and all that would come after him. It was unlimited, infinite and eternal, that incomprehensible expanse in the sky, and viewing it was such an experience that the Pride Landers only noticed it when it ended, with the rise of the Sun, some minutes later.

By this time, the fire was dead and the fragments that had fed it were almost all gone, scattered into the wind. But that was only in one sense—in another sense, every atom, every unit of energy that had gone into the fire hadn't been destroyed; instead, it had simply changed position and form. Simba—what had _made_ Simba—wasn't dead, not really, it was just… different, that was all.

"It's continuing," Kiara said to herself. She noticed Kovu giving her a questioning look, so she continued.

"Everything. It's all continuing, and it can't be stopped. Look," she said, and turned her gaze into the sky again before the last remnants of twilight could be chased away by the Sun.

Simba was there. Mufasa was there. The ones before them were there, and the ones after them were there, too, consolidated from a limitless number of possibilities into reality the closer it came time for them to come into existence.

So, while Simba's death was sad, it wasn't the end of everything. It wasn't the end of the world, nor the universe, and in a way, it wasn't the end of Simba, either. Simba's death was nothing more than a change of seasons; the winter of his life would be followed by the spring and the summer of the lives of those who he'd left behind, those who he lived through, because his blood ran in their veins.

And so the seasons changed, as Simba and the others stared at one another from across the endless depths of the universe. There was no more sadness, because the next Sun had risen, and it was proof that the flow of energy, of life, and that the universe itself was infinite, unlimited, eternal, and indestructible. Everything that happened was simply a process, a point, on the never-ending circle of life.

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(I hope you enjoyed this piece. It's intended to serve not just as pleasure, but as a way to deal with the more unpleasant and seemingly unfair aspects of life that we all must go through at some points. I believe that people of all religious and philosophical persuasions should be able to find some meaning in this piece.

In any case, please feel free to comment, review, and fave as necessary. See you next time.)


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